I think that Google Wave will be interesting for the social place it falls into. Will it be the new Usenet, or IRC, or web forums? Will it be large and unified ("I'm on Wave, hit me up"), or fragmented ("Yeah, I switched over to the wave Matt's running. You should try it out")?
If there is any validity to the X-Windows comparison, none of those questions make any sense. Substitute and you get "I'm on X-Windows, hit me up" or "Yeah, I switched over to the X-Windows Matt's running," which no one would ever say.
I agree that the coverage so far have said exactly the kinds of things you are saying. I never understood what they were really getting at, but this article makes a lot more sense to me. It is mainly a protocol, and what the press are calling "Wave" is just a demo app that Google put together.
In this case, though, I think the press are right. What really matters is what people do with the software, not what happens underneath. It's our job as nerds to get it from a communications protocol to a community.
These are the interesting parts, I think.